From water circulation to fish dispersal: A practice talk by Anna Lowe
Last week, Ocean Sciences PhD student, Anna Lowe, gave us a talk in preparation for a meeting with research collaborators to ensure that her work would be effectively communicated to a mixed audience. Her talk, entitled "A model description of the circulation patterns within and around Carmel Bay and the resultant larval dispersal patterns," was an elegant example of the interface between physical oceanography and biology, as she guided us through visually engaging models of water circulation in a local region off the Central Californian coast. Her models offer answers to the question of how larval rock fish may be moved between Carmel Bay and Monterey Bay. Anna distilled large oceanographic data sets into intuitive illustrations of complex phenomena, allowing viewers of many different backgrounds to easily follow her well thought-out explanations. Her work is an excellent example of the interdisciplinary nature of oceanographic research, in which characterizing the physics of a system allowed interpretation of an important ecological occurrence.
